NEW DELHI: The induction of four new members from Uttar Pradesh into the Modi Cabinet is an honest acknowledgement of the saffron party’s ground assessment that it requires caste-engineering to win the state in 2017 besides the PM’s in-your-face high-voltage campaign strategy that yielded historically rich electoral dividends in the 2014 general election, but fizzled out during the recent Assembly by-polls.
The Prime Minister, in the first expansion of his team, selected four BJP MPs from the state having diverse background -- Dr Mahesh Sharma, a Brahmin; Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, a Muslim; Sadhvi Nirnjan Jyoti from the most backward caste Nishad and Ram Shankar Katheria, a Dalit. The fifth member from the state would be an IITian- Cabinet Minister Manohar Parrikar, who is expected to file nomination from Lucknow for the Rajya Sabha seat on Monday.
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The induction of Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, a first-time MP from UP, is seen in some quarters as a message to leaders like Yogi Adityanath, seer-cum-MP from Gorakhpur, that hate speeches would not yield the desired result anymore in the democratic battle which is heating up after Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav decided to weave together the socialist dream hoping that it will fetch them the results in the next Assembly polls.
The state, which rejected the polarisation politics, now, has a lion’s share of 13 members in the Union Cabinet and the turf is open for the party high command to execute the game plan for the 2017 state battle.
Similarly, Modi has inducted three new ministers in his team from Bihar to neutralise the resurgence of ‘Mandal’ voters.
The BJP was jolted by the extraordinary performance of the grand alliance of JDU-RJD-Congress which had cornered six out of the 10 Assembly seats in the August bypolls.
Just months before the bypolls, the BJP and its allies had won 33 out of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in May.
But now, Yadav (Ramkripal Yadav), Bhumihar (Giriraj Singh) and Rajput (Rajiv Pratap Rudy) induction is seen as an attempt to balance the caste arithmetic and counter the emerging alliances among ideologically diverse parties in next year’s Assembly election in the state. Giriraj, who courted controversy during the election campaign for 2014 by asking Modi’s detractors to go to Pakistan, is the only Bhumihar leader from the state in Modi’s team, which has a sizeable votebank estimated to be around 6.2 per cent in Bihar.
Although, the saffron party had earlier concluded that the state polls are a referendum on local issues and leaderships and not on the Central Government, it still requires fitting itself into the caste matrix championed by regional satraps such as Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad in Bihar to checkmate the emergence of the grand Janata alliance.
Maharashtra too received satisfactory representation in the Union Cabinet and now it has a total of seven members to offset the growing internal differences with the old ally Shiv Sena.